The primary culprits for this massive price increase are the Mac Studio’s large amount of high-end memory and storage, “RAMageddon” pricing, hedging and Apple’s usual insistence on high profit margins. Apple said so itself when it first bumped MacBook prices back in June: “We’ve never seen component prices increase this much, this quickly. We’ve worked hard to absorb these costs and delay price increases for as long as possible, but the current environment has made that unsustainable.”
Let’s start with the RAM, or what Apple calls “unified memory,” because it’s shared between the CPU and GPU. With 1.2TB/s bandwidth when fully loaded with RAM, the Mac Studio M5 Ultra uses LPDDR5X memory. That RAM has a maximum throughput of 172GB/s, so Apple installs it right onto the M5 Ultra processor package to maximize speed, in a very wide bus (1,024 bits for the M5 Ultra model), to achieve the highest speeds. It’s the fastest and most expensive memory available, other than high bandwidth memory (HBM) used for servers.
It’s hard to say exactly how much the RAM makes up the price of a Mac Studio. Apple was reportedly paying around $6 per gigabyte for LPDDR5X memory earlier this year, but that price may be more like $10 or $11 now. Let’s say its memory cost for the 256GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra is around $2,500-$2,800. It currently retails for far more than that, but Apple obviously has major buying power. That cost is still a big chunk, though.
Pricing for the NAND storage is also much higher, with Apple’s cost is likely around $300 to $500 for 2TB worth based on the current market and high-end PCIe 5.0 memory it uses. Prices are reportedly around quadruple what memory cost when the previous Mac Studio came out, and double the price for storage.
That makes for an increase of about $2,200 to $2,400 at the high end. Rounding that up to account for other component increases, Apple’s costs are around $2,400 to $2,600 more, based on those very rough estimates.
You may recall that I said the Mac Ultra with 256GB was $3,800 more expensive this year, so where does the rest of that price increase come in? Apple reportedly shoots for around 40 percent gross margins on its computer hardware, but the new Mac Ultra pricing is nearly 60 percent higher than the estimated cost increase. There are a couple of possible reasons. One is that Apple is hedging against even higher future RAM prices so it can limit Mac Studio M5 price changes later. Another is that Apple is using the memory shortage to lift margins for its flagship desktop Mac. Or maybe it’s a little of column A, a little of column B.